Tuesday, August 29, 2006

QUIRKY but not in a good way!

After sending out the first pages of our novel to the possible agent, I sat by my computer checking my e-mail every second. Just as I was getting ready to go to work an e-mail arrived. I was too nervous to open it so I went to work.
Then I called Jenni later to tell her I was dying to know what it said and she thought I was nuts for not opening it. So we agreed that she would call me or have her internet hooked up by the time I got home and we would open it together.

All night I kept thinking that I wished we had gotten a chance to edit it and it would probably say the same thing as the Writer's House letter.

Jenni kept me waiting six minutes past scheduled time, which nearly killed me.
I finally opened it and this is what it said.

"....I took a look; it's hilarious and the fragmented structure works really well. But it's a tad quirky and I'm not entirely sure I'd be able to secure a publisher."

Now you can see how reading the first part can get your heart going a mile a minute only to have it smashed the next second. But it was better than the last response so it's encouraging and it made me feel way better about not having edited it.
The Writer's House letter had said they didn't think the fragmented style worked, which makes it clear that writing is very subjective. And I almost fell out of chair laughing when he said quirky after last night's post. Although he used quirky kind of negatively and it was actually the positive choice for my question.
I considered begging him to reconsider and just try to find a publisher but instead Jenni's going to send a nice thank you note.

Now our plans are to finish editing chapter 5 and then we'll go back and read through 1-5. We hope to make a list of notes and questions that we can give to a few samples readers and get some feedback, seeing as Liza Dawson Associates thought it was pretty good and Writer's House was more toward the not-so-great side. We're a little confused about what we should be fixing.

That's the plan for now.

2 comments:

Ashley said...

It's inspired by events that happened at the Bench. The more we write the more fiction it becomes.

I say yes you can read it and I don't think Jenni would mind either.

D.B. Echo said...

Pick up a copy of Adam Felber's "Schrodinger's Ball" to see just how quirky quirky can be. If anyone calls your stuff quirky, just read 'em a passage or two from there.